by Alisa Mullen
“What did she tell you, Emily?” I kept a straight and serious face because I knew the damage Grace’s answer had done to Jules. I was sure she still was haunted by who she thought she was supposed to be. In that moment, I hoped she and Brennan were able to move passed that.
What the hell kind of thought was that? Johnny Lennox doesn’t care about the happiness of the two people who initiated him to ruin his life and his band. Talking in third person was goofy on mushrooms but I doubted if Emily would be down with it at this point in our evening. Maybe I could try it out later, when I was Jedi mind tricking Emily out of her clothes.
“So, what did she tell us right then?” Emily pointed to the empty space on the floor where the board just was. “Or are you asking me what she told me when I was twelve?”
I stared at her in disbelief. Emily was so nonchalant, almost foul in her blank response to the really screwed up and creepy turn of events. A ghost? Yes, a ghost had just been in my apartment. Maybe I was too high and I’d imagined this and time actually skipped and we were talking about something else.
“She said that when I grew up, I would be N-I-C-E. Nice,” she said on a long exhale. “You know that already.”
I closed my eyes and watched the stars and spirals cloud my rapid brain synapses. I remember looking down at the Ouija board and it had not said “nice”. It had said “Kiss her.”
“She didn’t say that you were nice tonight,” I whispered to myself, opening my eyes slowly.
Emily cocked her head and for the first time since the board went fucking wacko on us, she looked disbelieving and shook her head in confusion.
“She always spells nice, Johnny. She did it the day that my father grounded me for kissing a boy in high school. She did it the day that I went in front of the Dean at UNH to tell them I had cheated on a paper when I really hadn’t. She did it the day that I got married. She has made her presence known quite a bit recently, but it’s always for me and it’s always to remind me that I am supposed to be a nice person,” she rambled.
I moved closer to her. I wanted to kiss her.
“I’m the nice daughter, the nice sorority student, the nice wife, and I guess I’m now the nice friend you never had?” she questioned me as she raised her eyebrows at me. She tried to lick her lips, but she had some serious cottonmouth. I got up to get her a beer. I grabbed two and plopped back down on the couch.
As I went to give it to her, she said something but I couldn’t hear her. Her mouth moved and it looked as though she said, “Kiss me”. Within seconds, I had Emily on her back. I kissed her hard and as fervently as I could. I needed to kiss her. She was safe. She didn’t let stupid Ouija boards and ghosts freak her out. She didn’t care that she looked like a homeless person. She was nice in all the ways that actually mattered.
I pulled back when I realized that I was not being so nice by kissing her. She would want a relationship or some shit. She would want a diamond ring and forever. That was only meant for… Jules. No, that wasn’t right. Emily was Jules. Jules was Emily. This was the most intense trip I had ever been on.
“Wow that was some kiss, Johnny. All I asked was if you missed Julia,” she said as she started to rub her lips.
“We need to get rid of that board,” I said urgently. That board was fucking me up, not the mushrooms. Every time I looked at Emily, she was seductively looking at me. She wanted sex. She wanted me to fuck her and hard. She was begging for it with her eyes and her luscious mouth.
“Why? The board doesn’t matter anymore. It won’t harm us. She only wants to remind me to be the nice person I’m supposed to be. I am being nice. Well, as nice as I can be under the circumstances, I guess. Divorce kind of sucks but divorcing Michael isn’t so bad.” She was talkative. So chatty. It was weird because normally I would nod and hum like I cared but with Emily, I hung on to every fucking word that came out of her mouth.
“You’re the first person that she’s ever made herself known to when she comes to me. It’s so weird she did that tonight.” Emily looked off into space and I noticed that a large tear fell from her eye. I tried to wipe it away but she told me not to.
“These mushrooms feel really good. I’m so glad I ate them.” She purposefully looked into my eyes and gave me a genuine smile. “I think I know why she chose you. She knew you wouldn’t call me a freak. I have never told anyone about it and I don’t like to think about it but now,” she inhaled and another tear fell, “it feels like I can let her go a little now that I don’t carry the burden of being haunted by that word. I can talk to someone who won’t throw me into a psych ward,” she laughed as she took a drink from her beer and put her bare feet up in a crisscross fashion. How was I supposed to kiss her when she sat like that?
Chapter Eighteen
Emily
Johnny wanted to kiss me. He kept looking at my lips and I swear he had foam coming out of the corners of his mouth. It must have been the mushrooms because I was seeing things. Every time I turned around, Johnny was closer to me. In my head, I thought about my life. I couldn’t help but have flashes of memories when Grace came to remind me that I was supposed to be the nice girl. Every instance was a time I had made a mistake, or my life was going to change for the worse, and even when people disrespected me. That wasn’t so nice for me. No, it was always nice for everyone else. I swear even my Dad grounding me at age sixteen was ridiculous. He didn’t want me to leave the house and seeing as I was starting my junior year and looking at colleges, he used that grounding period to spend time with me. We always had a good relationship but after that week, he sort of let me go. It was like he had a going away tribute and when the punishment time was over, he was distant and reclusive.
So, why would she want me to be nice during those times? Was she trying to tell me something? Tonight, she was totally out of character and showed herself to Johnny, an obvious believer after watching his skittish reaction. Thank God he didn’t throw me out. I had a feeling that Grace was trying to tell me something about Johnny. If all the other times she came, ended up in turmoil, what was the lesson of her coming to me tonight?
I looked over at Johnny who was staring down at my legs that were crisscrossed. He cleared his throat, and then looked back up at me.
“Em, will you uncross your legs so I can kiss you again?” he asked with blue stars and specks of yellow all around his head. How long was I going to be tripping on mushrooms? I halted in my thoughts and looked at him pointedly.
“Why did you just call me Em?” I asked. No one ever called me Em. It was either Emily or Emmy except one time when Grace had said hi to me in cheerleading. She said, “Hi, Em.” I was too shocked that she, the most popular girl on the squad, had spoken to me to even respond.
He lifted a shoulder and let it fall slowly. Then he looked at his shoulder again and watched himself lift it and let it fall.
“Do you know that Em spelled backwards is me?” he questioned as he continued to watch himself lift and lower his shoulder.
I started laughing. I laughed so hard that I doubled over in pain, having to uncross my legs because I was going to pee my pants. I got up and laughed all the way to the bathroom, where I continued to laugh. Em = Me. I could hear Johnny chuckling in the other room and that sent me straight into uncontrolled laughter. I was a goner. Mushrooms and Johnny were a terrible and fantastic mix. I would do this night over and over again but without the kissing and Grace.
Okay, maybe I liked the kissing but I was still married and Johnny was in love with Julia. As I walked passed his bedroom on my way back to him, I looked in and saw the wall of Jules. It hit me then that I was jealous. I wanted that to be the wall of Em. Me. That thought made me stop laughing entirely and it wasn’t until Johnny was next to my side, swiping the ugly tears from my face, did I notice that I was sobbing instead. Damn mushrooms.
“What’s going on? Em, you are really crying,” Johnny said as he tried to take me into his arms. “Why? What happened? Tell me.”
It went on l
ike that for at least four hours. I cried and he begged. He begged harder and I sobbed harder. We were a hot mess, standing there in the doorway of his room; the photo wall moving around with certain photos popping out. I would never be as cool as Jules. I was the nice girl that people walked on. Jules was the girl who had a spine and only did as she wanted.
No one, especially Johnny, would ever want me, the spoiled, rotten, broken girl that had orange hair and only wore sleepwear.
Finally, I pointed a shaky finger up to the wall.
“I wish that someone loved me so much that they made a wall of me,” I said in between my tears and the obvious hiccups that finally came and weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Johnny scowled down at me, and then turned his head to see the wall for himself. I wasn’t sure if he’d been to his bedroom since he’d gotten back from the tour tonight but it was as if he saw a pile of shit sitting in his room and wanted to be anywhere but there.
“That,” he said with his finger pointed into his room, “that is not love.”
He quickly moved to the wall and scanned it from one side to the other in a desperate attempt to see all the photos at once. He grabbed a small trashcan from the side of his bed and moved it to the wall.
“Em, this is a wall of my many, many foolish mistakes. I can tell you where and when each of these pictures were taken. I can also tell you that I was a complete fucking jackass on those days,” he said as he looked back to the wall with distaste.
He turned to one photo and ripped it off the wall, causing me to gasp.
“This night, I fucked a girl that looked like Jules. I even called out Jules’ name when I came.”
He threw the photo in the trash bin, looked down at it, and muttered, “I’m sorry.”
For the next hour, I watched and listened to everything that came out of Johnny’s mouth as he tore picture by picture off the wall and said something like, “I made a mistake” or “I didn’t care enough” or “I’m sorry”. The worse was “I hate myself for all the fucked up things I did.”
By the time the wall has proverbially crumbled into nothing, I wasn’t high anymore. I was awake and attentive but I didn’t see any more spirals or feel any weirdness in my body. I felt good. I felt alive. Most importantly, I felt like I might have just fallen in love with Johnny Lennox because the only thing I could do when he was finished, was walk right up to him and claim his lips, his chest, and his neck with my mouth. I assaulted him and he groaned with every single touch, lick, and kiss.
“Em,” he said in a husky voice as I was licking a path from his collarbone to his ear.
“Hmmm?”
“Em, I want to do this right this time. I want so much to lay you down on my bed and fuck you…hard. But I can’t, Em. I don’t want to make monumental mistakes anymore. Do you understand?”
I leaned back and felt the blow to my chest, like the time the Dean officially told me I was expelled from school and not permitted on the grounds after five o’clock that day. It lurched into my throat, but I held these tears back.
“I understand. You just did all of that,” I said, motioning to the blank wall. “I can’t ask you to jump into something with me. Besides, that wouldn’t be nice of me either. I’m still married.”
I started to walk back out of the room but he grabbed me.
“No, you stubborn, orange haired, lovely girl. I want something with you. Em, I couldn’t stop thinking about you the entire time I was on tour. I didn’t want other girls on tour. I haven’t had sex in… well, in a long time for Johnny Lennox. I don’t want my next time to be with just anyone. I want it to be with you, but only after we get to know one another and maybe kiss a lot. Maybe we could hold hands out on the street and you can share my bunk with me on tour,” he continued talking, sounding so confident and sure of himself.
I had forgotten about the job offer for the tour. I did want to go. I did want all the things Johnny wanted.
“I want to try, Johnny. If you can be patient with my divorce and well, I guess just getting through that, I would like to see where this goes,” I confirmed waving my hand between the two of us.
His lips claimed mine and despite his objecting to the bed, we fell into it anyway and stayed glued to each other.
I opened my eyes to see lights flickering at rapid speed and Kenny G blaring through the apartment. It was the motherlode of overstimulation.
“I’m still tripping, right?” I asked, looking around and not understanding what the hell was going on.
“Maybe but it looks like Grace just gave you her approval,” he laughed as his scruffy chin found the nook of my neck. Johnny began to root around for a comfortable place to nuzzle me. I liked it. It was really…nice.
Grace’s approval? No way, this was either really good or very, very wrong.
Chapter Nineteen
Johnny
I’ve always thought my mind was a like a house and each room was for rent. Music took up the master bedroom mostly. Sex probably took up the kitchen and bathrooms. Jules Delaney, up until tonight, took up every other part of my brain - my home. She was the cold, large basement in my brain where I stewed about life sucking ass. Not anymore. Jules has been evicted.
This thought brought me back to the now with Emily and her neck, her glorious neck, where I would bury myself into, maybe forever. If I could have her, I would make music the basement because it was a big space, but Emily could have the rest of the house. She was already in my thoughts, so it didn’t come as any surprise when I decided to let her move in permanently. Mushrooms were the key to lucid thoughts. I could see everything clearly now.
I propped up my head and faced Emily. Her eyes were still dilated and she looked so beautiful. How hadn’t I truly seen her before this? She was weird or maybe different in the nicest way. I smiled big at that word. It was nice.
“What?” she asked shyly. She was certainly feeling timid over what had just transpired and I couldn’t blame her.
“You’re weird but in like a nice way. You’re different. I like that,” I said as I kissed her mouth softly.
Her eyes stayed open and I could feel her struggling with herself. She wanted me but she was the nice girl, the haunted girl who never caught a break. I had to be careful with her because she was too nice. I could walk all over her and I didn’t want that. Not even a little.
“I think you’re kind of fucked in the head,” she answered, blushing hard.
My mouth dropped open and my eyes bugged out.
“Did you just swear at me, Em?”
I acted like I was horrified and she smiled brightly back at me. She nodded and started to giggle at herself. It was fucking adorable. I crashed my mouth into hers and she moaned when my tongue touched hers. She was delicious. I was breathing again. Through Em, I was breathing right for the first time and just, wow. I hadn’t felt this relieved in years, maybe in all of my life. She broke the kiss first and put her fingers over her mouth to feel our mixed saliva on her lips.
I grinned at her while she looked at her wet fingers.
“That felt incredible,” she whispered.
My mouth went to her temple as I drew her into a hug. She was warm and I loved the way her small body fit perfectly into mine. She sighed in relief, maybe from me not pressing her to do more, or maybe because she felt what I was feeling. Either way, I was fine with it.
“I don’t want you to look for another place, Em. I want you here with me.” I closed my eyes tight and waited for her to say something about needing to be on her own and seeing her independence through and shit. If she did – I would be proud of her but I wanted her to have all that and stay right here with me.
We stayed plastered against one another for a long time until I felt her yawn. We were coming down and it was coming up on dawn. She hadn’t answered me and it freaked me out a little.
“Do you want to go to bed now?” Emily asked, pulling away to look in my face. She yawned again.
“Yeah,” I smiled as I pu
lled my fingers through my hair. “Sure, let’s hit the sack.”
“Good, I’m so tired.”
Emily took off her pants and climbed into my bed, punching a pillow. When she looked back up at me, she raised her eyebrows.
“Are you coming to bed, Johnny?” she asked, still timid – but effectively inviting me.
I pulled off my shirt and shrugged out of my jeans while Em watched me with a little smile on her face. I dove right into the bed and wrapped my body around hers. It was fucking unbelievable. One night and I think I might have just fallen hard for a girl. This was different. It was different from Jules or my high school girl, Sara. It was a solid, fulfilling feeling. I didn’t try to understand why it was her but I did know that I was meant to be here with Em, falling asleep entangled with her. It felt real and right. I never knew much about a feeling like home but if I could describe it, this is how I think it would feel. Loved and safe.
“Do you ever think about the future and wonder if any of it will be worth the wait?” Emily asked me as we lounged in my bed the next afternoon. We had been playing with each other’s hands and fingers in silence for a long while; staring up to the ceiling listening to Dave Matthews sing about one night with a love.
My eyes slid over to her profile as we continued to play and stare. I tried to understand what she was asking me and I couldn’t. What was she waiting for?
“Worth the wait?” I asked, my eyes scrunched together in confusion.
“Yeah,” she exhaled and rolled over to stare at me. “I keep waiting for something to happen, something good. I thought if I did what I was supposed to, if I was the nice woman, friend, and wife, whatever – there would be a prize or something meaningful to happen to me.”
“So you obviously aren’t a ‘live in the moment’ type of person?” I asked, rolling over to stroke her face with the backs of my fingers.